On Wed, 2022-05-04 at 10:27 +0100, Allan Day wrote: > Adam Williamson <adamwill@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > ... > > Do GNOME users actually use Contacts and Calendar and Photos? I mean, > > I'm kind of a GNOME ultra, and I don't. > ... > > One of the reasons we need metrics is so we can answer these questions > using actual data, and I'll be much more comfortable making these > kinds of decisions once we have that. > > That said, my own personal sense is that Calendar is used to some > extent, and Contacts and Photos are used much less. That is somewhat > reflected in the app reviews: > > Firefox - 7236 reviews, 3.4 average rating > gedit - 896 reviews, 4.0 average rating > Calendar - 321 reviews, 3.0 average rating > Photos - 128 reviews, 2.3 average rating > Contacts - 84 reviews, 3.2 average rating > > The challenge we face is that, if we only included really high quality > apps with high levels of usage, we'd be left with very few apps > remaining! You could make an argument for removing Photos, Contacts, > Calendar, Cheese, Maps, Weather, Rhythmbox... and if we went down that > road, aside from leaving the desktop looking fairly empty, we'd also > potentially fall short in terms of user expectations. While people > might not always use these apps, there is something of an expectation > that they will be there, and indeed competing desktops do still > include equivalents. > > I'm also conscious of users who prefer not to use web services from > Google and Microsoft, as well as users who don't have continuous > access to high bandwidth internet connections. I get the perspective, but I'm not sure it's right. For a start, there's no email app, so - if we ignore the continued existence of Evolution, as GNOME seems determined to do, that means pretty much everyone is going to either use a completely non-GNOMEified app (Thunderbird), or a web service, to read their email. Both Thunderbird and every common webmail service I can think of can also handle contacts and calendar, so, why would someone take the trouble to use an app for those instead? I think it's fine to only include high-quality applications that are actually useful for something. I just don't see the value in including under-featured, buggy apps for purposes where there are much better choices out there, purely to make the desktop feel less 'empty'. That feels like the kind of thinking that causes smartphone vendors to fill their default home pages with junky home-made apps that nobody *ever* uses. I'm not super familiar with KDE's equivalents, but at least from my quick testing of them, they are way more featured than these apps (of course, it's *KDE*) and they have a fairly long history of development around stable core libraries so tend to work pretty well. > > That all said, my personal view is that we should drop Photos. > Contacts and Calendar I'm less sure about, because there is a more > active upstream in both cases. > > I'd also like to see us slim down and/or refresh our preinstalled > apps, in order to reduce the maintenance and testing burden. We have > designs in place for this in a number of cases - the image viewer, > photos, videos, the camera - I'd be really happy to see progress > there. I kinda like this idea in theory, but in practice so far what it seems to have resulted in is the replacement of apps which were maybe a little wonky and under-maintained, but which fundamentally did useful stuff - like Shotwell and Evolution - with apps that maybe have more guideline-compliant UIs and smaller codebases, but barely do anything useful and seem to be consistently buggy - like Photos and Contacts/Calendar. I'm not sure this has been a win overall. If this had been a short transition period during which the functionality and reliability of the new apps had been rapidly improved, that would be one thing (this is what I was hoping for at first). But so far it doesn't feel like that. gedit/gnome-text-editor is a closer call, to be fair. I still use gedit because I want a text editor that's good for coding but isn't a full- blown opinionated IDE, but I can see the case for g-t-e, and it doesn't seem as underfeatured and buggy as the others. -- Adam Williamson Fedora QA IRC: adamw | Twitter: adamw_ha https://www.happyassassin.net _______________________________________________ desktop mailing list -- desktop@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe send an email to desktop-leave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Fedora Code of Conduct: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/project/code-of-conduct/ List Guidelines: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines List Archives: https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/desktop@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Do not reply to spam on the list, report it: https://pagure.io/fedora-infrastructure
